DSP Shrinks Bluetooth Phones

Cambridge Silicon Radio’s MusiCore chip combines its Kalimba DSP with a Bluetooth interface. It replaces a Bluetooth transceiver while offloading the host processor’s audio chores, improving performance while reducing power requirements. Also, it can directly access MP3 files in shared, external SD flash memory for music playback when the host processor is powered down to provide battery life on par with MP3 players (about 100/80 hours for wired/wireless audio). It can handle transcoding chores for this mode as well as PCM streams from the host, delivering Bluetooth or speaker-based stereo output with performance that’s better than most phones. The chip costs about $1 more than CSR’s Bluetooth-only solution. The development kit, priced under $2000, includes host drivers for MusiCore and shared SD memory access.
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